6 years to fluency: My Chinese learning journey

By Felipe / Last updated October 15, 2024

I have been writing this blog for a few months now but some people have asked me why anything I write should matter to them. What do I even know about learning Chinese? A thing or two, actually. Let me share with you my Chinese learning journey, how it all started, how it went so far and how much time I have spent on it up until now. It's a longer read, so I hope you've got your coffee or milk tea handy. Let's go!

Why I started learning Chinese

People often ask me why I initially wanted to learn Chinese. Was I always interested in Chinese culture? Was I looking for a challenge? Did I do it to advance my career? Nope, none of that. Honestly, it was all just a coincidence.

I am from Germany and used to work in Porsche's development department as an electrical engineer. After a few years, I realized that that was not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. So I quit and went back to university to enroll in a master's program in robotics and AI at the Technical University of Munich. An exchange semester outside of Europe seemed like a great idea, so I decided to apply for it. My university gave me a list of partner universities around the world and told me to pick two that I'd be interested in. My dream was always to go to the US and study at an Ivy League university, so I checked the partner universities in the US first. However, the universities on the list did not tickle my fancy.

Thinking about other interesting places to go, I checked out the universities in other countries. The problem was that most universities had language requirements that I would struggle to meet in time. I don't speak any Spanish and my French is abysmal. Eventually, my gaze fell on Asia, where most universities did not have any language requirements. I was never particularly interested in going to Asia but I thought to myself, "Who knows? Might be interesting." The first university I picked was Tokyo University. Japan was the only Asian country I knew anything about and I like anime, so that was an easy pick. For the second university, I thought that spending some time in China looks good on a resume. I also had a friend who had been to China and couldn't stop raving about it. Our conversation went something like this:

Me: "I need to pick a Chinese university. Do you know a good one?"
Him: "Is Tsinghua on the list?"
Me: "Um... Yes."
Him: "Pick that one."
Me: "Okay."

It was now my university's turn to decide whether I would go to Tokyo or Beijing. They picked Beijing and I started learning Chinese.

Slow beginnings

I had half a year left until the exchange semester, so I started straight away. "How hard can it be to learn Chinese", I thought to myself. First, I took an "intensive" two-week introductory course during the semester break. After spending two weeks with lots of "mā má mǎ mà ma" and trying to figure out why Chinese people wouldn't just use pinyin instead of Chinese characters, I was not thrilled. I didn't really like how the language sounded and thought that it was unnecessarily complicated. I kept attending a course once per week during the following semester but didn't put too much effort into it. Nonetheless, I more or less knew around 200 - 300 words by the time I went to Beijing. "Enough to get by", I thought to myself.

I arrived in Beijing late in the evening in September of 2018 and had booked a hotel for the first night. My flight was late and the whole immigration process was slow. A voice on the speakers told everyone that there were not enough taxis and that one would have to wait up to three hours to get one. I had read that one should not take the unofficial taxis at the airport because they would rip tourists off, but I also did not want to wait for three hours, so I paid way too much for the taxi. On a slip of paper I had written down the address of the hotel and the university for the next morning. I had also practiced the pronunciation, so that I could tell the taxi driver where to go. To my dismay, he didn't understand me at all and I had to show him the address. I also didn't understand anything he was saying (although, to be fair, I don't know if I would now, Beijing taxi drivers are notoriously hard to understand).

At the hotel, I showed my reservation to the lady at the reception. To my surprise, she shook her head, waved her hands, and said, "No room". I started fumbling for my phone to ask Google Translate for help, but my phone was gone! I slowly started panicking. "It must have slipped out of my pocket while I was in the taxi. How am I ever going to find that taxi again? And where am I gonna stay tonight? It's past midnight!" Luckily, the receptionist was an angel. We communicated via a translation app on her phone and she started making some calls. 15 minutes later someone picked me up and drove me to another hotel. However, that hotel didn't accept my credit card. I didn't have enough Renminbi on me, so I gave them the 100 euros in cash that I had forgotten to exchange at the airport and promised to get cash in the morning. "I hate China", were my last thoughts before I went to sleep.

The next morning, I woke up surprisingly well rested. My phone reappeared deep down in my backpack. I had put it in there at the airport and it had somehow slipped to the bottom. I got cash from an ATM nearby and paid for the hotel room. A taxi brought me to the gate of Tsinghua University. The sun was shining and it was a nice and warm autumn day. Things could only get better. And they did.

A whole new world

Tsinghua University in Beijing is a pretty renowned university. Kind of the MIT of Asia, it's currently ranked 12th in the world and is particularly strong in engineering disciplines. I was initially planning on focusing on technical courses and wanted to put minimal effort into learning Chinese. However, I was suddenly in China and surrounded by people who were mostly very keen on learning Chinese. Some were even attending full-time Chinese language learning programs. So I decided to at least not waste the opportunity to learn more Chinese.

Being in China for the first time was a surreal experience. The first days of the semester were a fun mess of getting administrative things done, setting up a course schedule, and checking out all the canteens on campus. I quickly made new friends and we explored the new environment together. It soon became painfully clear to me that I was basically illiterate, which was a very humbling experience. Information was everywhere around me but I simply could not access it. That was sometimes exhausting but it also turned everything into a challenge and adventure.

Driven by my newfound zest for learning Chinese, I attended as many Chinese classes as I could, even if they were beyond my level. My idea was to expose myself to the language as much as possible and take advantage of the Chinese environment. However, I found most of the classes very intimidating. Each class had around 15 to 30 students. There were always some people who were at least slightly ahead of the rest and sounded so much more fluent. I usually stayed quiet in class because I felt so embarrassed about my Chinese. Furthermore, the large number of students made the learning rather inefficient. Therefore, I started studying more by myself.

Before my stay in China, I refused to accept the fact that tones are all that important. It just didn't make sense to me that I could say syllables with different intonations and, hence, completely change their meaning. After going to Beijing it slowly dawned on my that tones are important, whether I liked it or not. So I decided to start over and get my tones straight. Without really knowing what I was doing, I made a good decision and started shadowing. I picked very simple texts from my textbooks and asked a friend who was fluent in Chinese to record them for me. Then I sat down and recorded myself trying to mirror the sounds I was hearing as well as I could. With some feedback from my friend I was able to quickly improve my pronunciation. I don't know how many hours I spent on this. Maybe 20 or 30? Regardless, those are probably the hours that were the most critical during my Chinese learning journey. So don't practice your tones in isolation, use shadowing and practice tone pairs.

You might be thinking, after half a year in China I must have been able to hold some basic conversations, right? Right?? Well, no. My biggest achievement was that I could order orange juice or Coke zero at the drinks counter of one of the canteens without pointing at what I wanted. That doesn't sound like much, but a fire inside of me was lit and I made a plan: Get good at Chinese, write my master's thesis at Tsinghua university and then live in China for a few years. But first, I had to return to Germany to finish the rest of my studies.

On my own

When I left Beijing, I was at an HSK 2-3 level. Not very high, but too high for my university to offer any Chinese courses, so I had to find other ways. First, I signed up for a course at the Confucius Institute in Munich. That course was a mixed bag. The teacher was funny and the group consisted of only five students, but the pace was very slow.

As a result, I started self-studying a lot more. I kept working through the textbooks I had brought back from Beijing and built a habit of reviewing flashcards. Over the course of a few months, my vocabulary got bigger and bigger. I also found a language buddy at my university. She was determined to get good at German and I was determined to get good at Chinese, so we met twice a week to practice. Language buddies are a great thing in my opinion. Sure, they are not teachers and often can not exactly tell you why a language is the way it is. But at the same time they will teach you slang and common words that you don't find in a textbook.

My initial plan for going back to China and getting my Chinese up to standards was to enroll in a language program at a university somewhere in China. However, I was a bit burned out at the time and missed all deadlines to apply for those programs. Running out of options, I decided to go all-in. Shanghai. 5 months. 4 hours of one-on-one classes every day. 10,000€. Let's go.

Let's get down to business

During the placement test I apparently left the impression that my Chinese was better than it was in reality. On the second day, one of my teachers put it like this, "Your vocab is really good, but your foundation is weak and you don't know how it all works together." Fair enough. So we want back to HSK 3 books and got my grammar up to par.

What followed was the most intense learning experience I've ever had. I got up early every morning to preview the new lesson of the day, because showing up unprepared meant that I would have to waste time learning the new words during the lesson while the teacher waited for me. After four hours of class, I went home or to a café to do my home work and review what I had learned. Every night, before going to bed, I reviewed flashcards for about an hour.

If I were to do it again, I wouldn't go as hard as I did. There is a limit to how much input a brain can process and I discovered my limit during the time in Shanghai. The one-on-one sessions were extremely effective but they were also very taxing because my teachers didn't have anyone else to focus on. It didn't matter how hard I worked or how fast I learned something, my teachers could always turn it up a notch. I should have taken a week off after every three weeks of classes to give my brain some time to process the new knowledge. Furthermore, I didn't account for unforeseeable events like catching a cold. I was sick for one week and we had to make up for the missed lessons on the following weekends.

Regardless, the hard work ultimately paid off and my Chinese showed some massive improvements during my time in Shanghai. I passed the HSK 5 test after about 4 months and after that we reduced the intensity a bit and focused more on speaking. Overall, learning Chinese full-time for 5 months, without distractions and starting with some previous knowledge, got me to a conversational level after a total of 2 years. But that was only the beginning.

The long run

I've got big news for you: Learning Chinese is not a sprint. It's a marathon. The 5 month long sprint in Shanghai got my Chinese on track, but I was far from done. My plan was to go back to Tsinghua University in Beijing to write my thesis. However, I wanted to travel in China for a month first. The second stop on my itinerary was Wuhan...

A week before I was supposed to head out, COVID became a real concern. With every passing day, some student from the language school would say, "I'm leaving tonight. They are cancelling all flights from China and this is the last flight back home". Going to Wuhan didn't seem like a great idea under those conditions, so I thought, "I'll just go to Taiwan for a month and then go to Beijing after this whole virus thing has settled a bit". To my defense, at the time nobody knew what was about to happen to the world. Two days after I landed in Taiwan, the country closed it's borders and I was stuck in Taiwan.

All my plans went down the drain but getting stuck in Taiwan during the pandemic was actually quite nice. Taiwan is a beautiful place, the people are amazing, Mandarin is the official language, and there were a measly 7 COVID cases in the first 6 months. There was only one small problem: Taiwan uses traditional characters. I had just put in so much effort to learn simplified characters and now I was back to square one again?! After some initial resistance, I eventually switched my flashcards to traditional characters. The transition took a few annoying months but at least I can read both character sets now.

My time in Taiwan marked the beginning of a long and solitary Chinese learning marathon for me. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower, I would chip away at the task of improving my Chinese. I didn't take any more classes, but kept reviewing my flashcards and started consuming more Chinese material in the form of books, music, movies, and video games. "Luckily", there were not many distractions during the pandemic.

I had to leave Taiwan at some point because my tourist via couldn't be extended any longer, so I went back to Germany for two years. However, in summer of 2022 I successfully applied for a Gold Card that allowed me to enter Taiwan again, despite COVID restrictions still being in effect. I have spent most of my time since then in Taiwan and am really enjoying it.

Where am I on my Chinese learning journey now? Is my Chinese at a native level? No. Is it as good as my English? No. But that also took more than 10 years to get to the level it's at. Can I have conversations about a broad range of topics? Yes. Can I read whatever I want to read? Yes. Could I hold a speech in Chinese? Probably after some preparation. Do I know many westerners who speak better Chinese than me? I've personally only met one or two. Of course there are many people out there who are extremely good at Chinese. Just check social media. However, most of them have made speaking Chinese their job. So although I still feel like an impostor saying this: I am fluent in Mandarin.

Real talk

After giving you a rough idea of my Chinese learning journey so far, it's time to talk some numbers. This is the first time I put together the data that I have gathered over the years and I honestly did not expect them to be this high.

Study hours

Let's start with the time I have spent actively studying Chinese. I took roughly

• 40 hours of classes at university in Munich,

• 120 hours of classes during my stay in Beijing,

• 30 hours at the Confucius Institute in Munich,

• 400 hours of one-on-one classes in Shanghai.

That's a total of almost 600 hours. I think we can easily triple this number to account for self-study, homework, language buddy sessions, and so on and so forth.

Flashcards

Reading: I started using Pleco's flashcard system in October 2018 and have since reviewed 253,703 flashcards to practice reading. The following chart shows the number of words I have learned in that time:

You can see a massive increase in vocabulary during my time in Shanghai between September 2019 and January 2020. Back then I learned an average of 30 new words per day. You can also see the impact of starting a new job in June of 2021 and how I got a bit lazy last year. Regarding the time I spent on reviewing the flashcards, I usually need an average of 6 seconds per flashcard, so I spent around 420 hours in total. That's an average of 12 minutes per day, but the majority of this happened in the first three years.

Writing: I initially did not invest a lot of time into learning how to write Chinese characters. The first 200 characters were useful to get used to typical stroke orders, but after that I completely stopped writing characters. However, at some point I felt like it became harder and harder to memorize new characters just by looking at them, because so many of them started to look very similar. So I started a little initiative during the fourth year of my Chinese learning journey.

You can see again how detrimental getting a full-time job is to learning Chinese (June 2021). I already more-or-less knew how to read all these characters, so my progress was very fast. In the end, I knew how to write around 3,500 characters, which apparently accounts for 99.5% of characters one would encounter in the wild. I have since forgotten how to write basically all of these characters, but the writing exercise helped strengthening my reading skills. I reviewed close to 33,000 writing flashcards at a speed of roughly 10 seconds per flashcard. That's just over 90 hours in total.

Reading

Starting from my fourth year of studying, I really pushed myself to read more in Chinese. I had read very easy books like Harry Potter and The Little Prince before, but now I wanted to take a more principled approach. I started by working my way through the Roald Dahl collection, containing classics like Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. Although the stories were sometimes a bit boring for an adult, they provided sufficiently simple vocabulary to get into the habit of reading, without being frustrated. Afterwards, I ramped up the difficulty to the point where I was reading books that I was genuinely interested in. Here is a list of the books I have read so far, some in simplified and some in traditional characters:

• 哈利波特 1+2 (Harry Potter 1 + 2)

• 寻路中国 (Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip)

• 女巫 (The Witches)

• 独闯天下 (Going Solo)

• 魔法手指 (The Magic Finger)

• 好心眼儿巨人 (The BFG)

• 了不起的狐狸爸爸 (Fantastic Mr Fox)

• 查理和巧克力工厂 (Charlie And The Chocolate Factory)

• 詹姆斯与大仙桃 (James And The Giant Peach)

• 山茶文具店

• 解忧杂货店 (The Miracles Of The Namiya General Store)

• 人鼠之间 (Of Mice And Men)

• 南京大屠殺 (The Rape Of Nanking)

• 猎魔人 1 + 2 + 3 (The Witcher 1 + 2 + 3)

• 三体 1 (The Three-Body Problem)

• 撒哈拉故事 (Stories Of The Sahara)

• 交易的世界 (Trading The World)

• 吃佛 (Eat The Buddha)

• 一人企業 (Company Of One)

That's already quite the list, but my reading is still very slow. My data is a bit incomplete here, but I read most of those books on WeChat Read and it tells me that I have a reading speed of about 144 characters per minute. That's not even half as fast as a native speaker and means that it takes me about 20 hours to read most of the books on my list. In total, I have thus spent somewhere north of 300 hours on reading books. Maybe reading speed is something to focus on during my seventh year of studying Chinese?!

In total

I gotta say, those are some scary numbers. I wasn't even aware of just how much time I have already spent on learning Chinese. Adding up the above numbers tells me that I spent at least 2500 hours on it. This does not include TV shows, movies, and video games because I don't have reliable data on those. This also doesn't include the time interacting with natives due to living in a Chinese-speaking environment. Let's just say 3,000 hours in total. And I'm not even done yet. If anyone ever asks you how long it takes to learn Chinese, you can point them to this data. It's as real and unfiltered as it gets.

Closing thoughts

Congratulations, you and I have almost made it to the end of this rather long blog post 🙂 There are just a few more things I would like to talk about.

Is it possible to get good at Chinese?

Yes, it is. I've done it (shut up impostor syndrome!). However, I often get a response like this: "But you clearly have a talent for languages! And you had time! And money!" Alright then, let's talk it through.

Talent. I don't have a talent for languages. My French and English grades in high school were pretty average. My pronunciation was not great either, but I got told that's fine because we can't be good at everything. So I accepted my fate and stopped taking French lessons as soon as they weren't a mandatory part of the curriculum anymore.

I started learning Chinese when I was 24. Many people would agree that that is way too late to master a new language. Let's be real here. I will probably never speak Mandarin like a native, because I missed those formative years as an infant being exposed to Mandarin. But let me ask you this: When was the last time you put 3,000 hours into something, partly under the supervision of professional instructors, and did not get very damn good at it? People see only the result but not the countless hours that went into achieving it. I am not saying that talent doesn't exist, but it probably just makes a difference of a few hundred hours more or less to reach your goal. Peanuts.

Time. Learning Chinese as a second language takes a massive time commitment. There is no way around it. There is no shortcut. So yes, having the time to commit to studying Chinese full-time helps. If you don't have that opportunity, what are your options? You can either reduce the scope or extend the time you are willing to wait to see results. For example, an 8-year-old has better handwriting than me, but that's okay. I reduced the scope so I could make progress in other areas instead. If you can't reduce the scope and cannot allot more time to studying, that's still not a reason to give up. Just be prepared to wait longer until you see results. You will see them eventually though. Pinky promise!

Money. Yes, it helps. Being able to pay for a teacher is definitely going to boost your progress. The next best thing you can get for free is a language buddy. They can explain basic concepts to you and help you with your pronunciation. Without a teacher it's definitely going to take longer to reach your learning goals, but people have done it.

Would I do it again?

Oof, tough one. Probably not. My Chinese learning journey started really randomly and I was very naive in the beginning. I had no idea what I was in for, but once I was in, I couldn't stop. Basically, since I started learning Chinese, I have fallen victim to sunk cost fallacy. I originally thought that I would be "done" with learning Chinese after going to Shanghai. That wasn't the case though. So I thought to myself, "Surely, after 5 years I will be done with learning Chinese". Nope. Even now, I am afraid to lose my Chinese as soon as I stop using it. I feel like it would only take a year before I would have to start all over again. And all this time Chinese has been keeping me from doing other things. In the time it took me to learn Chinese, I could have gotten fluent in several other languages. Or I could have gotten a lot better at making music.

That being said, I am glad that I was so naive in the beginning. Learning Chinese has exposed me to a completely new world. I have learned so much about Asia, it's culture, and it's history since I started out on this journey. Many amazing people have crossed my path over the years and I wouldn't trade the experiences I've had for the world. I can accept the fact that I will keep feeling like my Chinese is insufficient. But who knows, maybe one day I'll write a blog post "15 years to native-level Chinese: I'm finally done".

The end

Okay, that's it. Enough for today. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. It's always interesting to hear about other people's Chinese learning journeys, so please feel free to share yours! Send me an email, my blog is always open for guest posts. Also, if you want me to talk in more detail about anything from this article, let me know. I'm always looking for good blog post ideas.

Until next time, happy learning! 🙂